rigorousintuition.caWhat you don't know can't hurt them.2019-02-20T22:02:44-04:00http://www.rigorousintuition.ca/board2/feed.php?f=332019-02-20T22:02:44-04:002019-02-20T22:02:44-04:00http://www.rigorousintuition.ca/board2/viewtopic.php?t=40783&p=670200#p670200sounds more like a hideous CIA mind control experiment than a legitimate program. Working for the Washington DC facility of Straight Inc. in Springfield VA was Paul Bishop, a CIA officer with "special qualifications" (being a pedophile) to infiltrate child trafficking rings. You might even remember the name Paul Bishop from the discussion about the Johnny Gosch case in 2005. As for Georgia, it really is a cesspool of electronic vote rigging, probably some of the worst in the country. There were the shocking GOP upsets in 2002 and now a lot of anomalies in very recent elections. It's good to see people down there are finally starting to raise hell about it.

Did you hear about how in 2017, it was revealed that all of Georgia's election files (held by Kennesaw State University's Center for Election Systems) were left wide open to the Internet? There was something particularly ominous in the article:

After Lamb discovered the initial problems last August, he notified Merle King, executive director at the center, who thanked Lamb and said he would get the server fixed. It was months before the presidential election, and King pressed Lamb not to talk about the issue with anyone, especially the media.

“He said, It would be best if you were to drop this now,” Lamb recalls. King also said that if Lamb did talk, “the people downtown, the politicians … would crush” Lamb.

This is just a glimpse of how there is clearly a corrupt power structure that needs the machines to be kept in place.

Georgia voting irregularities raise more troubling questions about the state’s electionsKIM ZETTER02/12/2019 12:06 PM EST Voters line up in Georgia Georgia voters cast nearly 4 million ballots on Election Day, but about 160,000 of them showed no vote cast in the lieutenant governor race, about 4.3 percent of ballots. | Jessica McGowan/Getty ImagesLawsuits, complaints about lax security and accusations of voter suppression marred Georgia’s election for governor in November.

But the state’s race for lieutenant governor had its own trouble, Democrats and election security advocates say.

The contest between Republican Geoff Duncan and Democrat Sarah Riggs Amico drew far less national attention than the marquee governor’s race in which GOP candidate Brian Kemp narrowly defeated Stacey Abrams. But plaintiffs in a lawsuit against the state say abnormalities in the lieutenant governor’s election raise questions about Duncan’s victory — and potentially about the outcome of other races on the ballot if the state’s electronic voting machines were to blame.

In addition to the lawsuit, Amico asked the state to investigate irregularities in the election.

The problem: Georgians cast nearly 4 million ballots on Election Day, but about 160,000 of them showed no vote cast in the lieutenant governor race, about 4.3 percent of ballots. To election experts, this so-called “undervote” rate — when a race is left blank — is evidence either that Georgia voters were unusually apathetic about their lieutenant governor, or that something went wrong.

It’s normal for 1 to 2 percent of voters to skip a race or races on a ballot, election experts say. But besides being more than double that normal rate, the number of uncast votes in the lieutenant governor race also exceeded Duncan’s margin of victory over Amico, which was just 123,172 votes.

The puzzling numbers call new attention to Georgia’s paperless, touchscreen voting machines, which drew lawsuits in 2017 from election-integrity groups that say the machines are not secure and want the state to switch to paper ballots that can be audited. Those lawsuits are ongoing, but after the midterm elections one of the groups, the Coalition for Good Governance, filed a second lawsuit with two Georgia voters and the losing Libertarian candidate for Georgia secretary of state, to invalidate the lieutenant governor results and conduct a forensic examination of the voting machines.

The lawsuit cited the abnormal undervote numbers as well as complaints from three voters who signed affidavits saying the lieutenant governor’s race either didn’t show up on their onscreen ballots or displayed oddly on the touchscreen voting machines. A state judge last month dismissed the suit on grounds that the complaints were limited to specific precincts, and any missing votes in those precincts would not be enough to alter the outcome of the race. The plaintiffs plan to appeal.

In her letter to interim Secretary of State Robyn Crittenden in November requesting an investigation, Amico said the high undervote rate indicates "serious inadequacies" in the administration of the election and possible problems with the voting machines. But Crittenden rebuffed Amico’s request, saying undervotes alone were not sufficient evidence of a problem. Amico expressed amazement at the state’s lack of interest in looking into what happened in her race.

"If this were an accounting department that found a missing $100,000 instead of 100,000 votes, there would be an investigation," she told POLITICO. Amico, who is not a party to the lawsuit, did not call for the results to be thrown out.

"I'm literally seeking to make sure this never happens to any candidate from any party ever again,” she said.

The Georgia Secretary of State’s office did not respond to repeated requests for comment.

Longtime voting machine expert Douglas Jones said Amico and the plaintiffs ran into a common roadblock for people seeking to uncover the facts behind unusual election results.

"It's the Catch-22 that's been around forever where you can't get any legal support [to investigate] unless you've got proof that something went wrong. But the evidence you need to get that proof is hidden from you because there is no access to the material you need to prove it," said Jones, a professor of computer science at the University of Iowa.

Voters intentionally or unintentionally leave races blank all the time — for example, if they don’t like any of the choices in a race or they overlook the race on the ballot. And it's not unusual for races that appear lower on a ballot to have higher undervote rates than those at top, because voters often deem down-ballot races to be less significant.

But election experts who filed affidavits in the lawsuit note that the undervote rate in Duncan and Amico’s race was the highest of any Georgia lieutenant governor race since 2002, which traditionally had rates around 1 percent. It was also four times the rate of the nine other statewide races on Georgia’s ballot last year: The only other race with a marginally high number of undervotes was the contest for agriculture commissioner, which had a rate of just 2.4 percent.

And the experts point to a telling difference in results based on the method voters used to cast their ballot: The undervote rate in the lieutenant governor’s race was just 1 percent on mail-in or absentee paper ballots, compared with 4.5 percent on ballots cast on touchscreens, according to Christopher Brill, a senior data analyst with TargetSmart, who analyzed the numbers for the plaintiffs.

The difference in undervotes between paper ballots and machine ballots is a sign that something was wrong either with the digital ballot layout — which may have caused voters to miss the race on screen — or with the machines, Jones said.

"The absentee ballots provide strong confirmation that this is unusual, because people who voted on paper had an opinion in this race" and wanted to vote in it, Jones told POLITICO. He said the data contradict claims by state election officials that the undervote rate was high because voters simply weren't interested in the race.

Furthermore, the plaintiffs produced a report over the weekend showing that the high undervote rates on touchscreen machines were concentrated in precincts that are predominantly African-American. The rates in such precincts “are far greater than the undervote rates in non-African American neighborhoods regardless of whether those neighborhoods lean Democratic or Republican,” they wrote in their report. “The undervote problem did not happen at the same exaggerated levels in many primarily White neighborhoods that overwhelmingly voted for Stacey Abrams and other Democrats, rebutting the argument that the difference can be explained by party-driven voter behavior.”

Crittenden, in her denial of Amico’s request for an investigation, said the state did "parallel testing" of voting machines on Election Day, using sample machines and the same code used on machines in counties. These tests have "always shown 100% accuracy," she wrote in her response.

But experts say parallel testing is not a reliable indication of Election Day problems. If voters overlooked a race because of confusing or poor ballot design, this probably won’t show up in testing, which is often done with a script instead of conditions that emulate real voting. And someone who wants to subvert a machine can design malicious code that senses if a machine is in test mode and only acts during a real election.

"It reminds me of the Wizard of Oz saying, 'Don't look behind that curtain, ignore that man,'" Jones said of the state’s refusal to investigate. "There is evidence that something is anomalous in this race, and the state's response is 'No, everything is fine. Please don't look, don't ask these questions.'"

Chip Lake, a campaign adviser for Duncan, told POLITICO that Amico and the lawsuit plaintiffs are guessing at a cause for the undervotes. He said that if the problem was a machine malfunction, it would have shown up in every race, not just one.

“Why was it only in that race, and why did [the high undervote rate] spread over 159 counties?” he said.

Instead, he suggested, the digital ballot layout confused voters. On paper ballots, the governor’s race appeared above the one for lieutenant governor. On voting machines, they were side by side. Lake suspects that voters either overlooked the latter race on the touchscreens or mistakenly thought the two races were linked — perhaps believing that if they cast a vote in the gubernatorial race, this would automatically cast a vote for the candidate from the same party in the lieutenant governor’s race.

But Sara Tindall Ghazal, director of the voter protection program for the Democratic Party of Georgia, said it’s unlikely voters overlooked the lieutenant governor race, because each was clearly marked and set off in a different box. If voters were expecting the races to be linked, she said, they would have noticed if no “X” appeared in the lieutenant governor race when they selected a candidate for governor.

Ghazal points to another possible culprit: In Election Day calls to the Democratic Party’s hotline and in affidavits filed with the lawsuit, she said numerous voters reported that the lieutenant governor’s race was missing from their ballot and showed up only on a review screen at the end of the selection process. Some said they could then scroll back and cast a vote for lieutenant governor — a process other voters might have missed. Asked how many voters complained about this, Ghazal said she didn’t know.

One voter, Chris Ramirez, who signed an affidavit in the lawsuit, said that only Duncan's name appeared in the lieutenant governor race on page one of his touchscreen ballot. Amico's name was on the next page, with no header or context indicating why it was there, he wrote in his account. Although he was able to select her name on that page, he wasn’t sure the machine recorded his vote.

Another voter, Ronica Johnson, told POLITICO she voted in the lieutenant governor race, but the review screen indicated she’d left it blank. She scrolled back through the ballot to make her selection again, but was so concerned the machine might not record her vote, that she reported the problem to a poll worker. She said the poll worker dismissed her concern.

A third voter, mentioned in the lawsuit but not identified, tried to go back to vote in the lieutenant governor race after seeing it was blank on her review screen, but when she touched the box next to a candidate’s name to make her selection in the race, the machine immediately jumped to a page indicating she had just cast her ballot, though she had not touched the “cast ballot” button. Her account of what occurred was supported by a polling place manager, who called the Democratic hotline. Another caller at the hotline said the lieutenant governor race never appeared onscreen until the voter reached the review screen at the end of the ballot.

Such problems might not have been limited to the lieutenant governor’s race, even without similar complaints from voters in other races, experts say.

"Any sign that the machines are failing certainly is evidence that you can't trust any results from the machines," says Walter Mebane a political scientist and statistician at the University of Michigan, who is not associated with the lawsuit. "[I]f one has doubts about the machines, then basically nothing is trustworthy from them."

High undervote rates have posed problems before with paperless electronic voting machines. In 2006 in Sarasota County, Fla., for example, more than 18,000 ballots cast on paperless touchscreen machines recorded no vote in a hotly contested congressional race, an undervote rate of 13 percent. The victor, Republican Vern Buchanan, won by fewer than 400 votes.

Like Georgia, Florida election officials insisted voters had intended to leave the race blank. But voters in 19 precincts had complained to poll workers on Election Day that the touchscreens were failing to register their touch — a common symptom of calibration issues on touchscreen machines.

That congressional election came four years after a baffling village council race in Palm Beach County was decided by a margin of four votes — after 78 voters failed to record any selection at all on the touchscreen machines. In that case, the race was the only one on the ballot, making it especially odd that so many voters would take the trouble to go to the poll and then intentionally cast a blank ballot.

Georgia is one of five states in the U.S. — alongside South Carolina, Louisiana, New Jersey and Delaware — that still rely entirely on paperless electronic voting machines, though the state plans to replace its machines with ones that use paper ballots. In the absence of paper ballots, the best way to investigate if something went wrong with the current voting machines in Georgia is to examine the code on them, experts say.

In the lawsuit seeking an investigation, Georgia Superior Court Judge Adele Grubbs at first agreed to let the plaintiffs examine some of the voting machines in three counties. But she specified that they could examine only the memory and not files and data used to program machines. The activists agreed even though they felt memory alone wouldn't reveal if the machines had been misprogrammed or maliciously altered. Still, the counties didn't comply with the order, according to plaintiffs. And when they complained about that to Grubbs, she ignored their argument that the counties weren’t in compliance and ruled to dismiss the case.

"It strikes me this is a case where on its face it looks like there was a problem, and any sensible jurist, it would seem to me, would want to know if any malfunction occurred in the [machines]," said election expert Henry Brady, dean of the Goldman School of Public Policy at the University of California at Berkeley, who is not involved in the lawsuit. "[T]he requests made by the plaintiffs were quite reasonable.”

Amico said she's not dropping the issue. She spoke last month to a committee convened by the Georgia Democratic Caucus to look into a number of issues around the November midterms, including undervotes.

"If the Republicans have zero intellectual curiosity about what caused this kind of undervote rate to exclusively happen on touchscreen voting machines,” she told POLITICO, “we all need to ask ourselves what could their motivation be for such an egregious lack of curiosity.”

CORRECTION: A previous version of this report misstated where voters in Florida experienced Election Day abnormalities; they occurred in 19 precincts. The report has also updated to clarify a dispute between Georgia Superior Court Judge Adele Grubbs and voting rights activists over access to voting machine data.https://www.politico.com/story/2019/02/ ... ns-1162134

]]>2019-02-18T16:14:34-04:002019-02-18T16:14:34-04:00http://www.rigorousintuition.ca/board2/viewtopic.php?t=40914&p=670107#p670107Roger Stone now directly attacking the federal judge presiding over his case and posting a pic of her head beside crosshairs

original photo of the judge came from a site called cosmicconvergence. org, an anti-Semitic, New World Order conspiracy group.

In which a neoconservative jack-of-all-trades, a pair of Pentagon hawks, and an Iranian exile with a knack for tall tales try to outflank the CIA and conjure a coup in Tehran.

Laura RozenJuly/August 2006 Issue

Illustration: Steve Brodner

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On December 21, 2001, military officials and intelligence operatives from three nations—the United States, Italy, and Iran—made their separate ways to a commercial building set anonymously amid the shops, cafés, and fountains of Rome’s bustling Piazza di Spagna, and disappeared inside. Among the tourists enjoying the famous Spanish Steps, and the Romans going about their Christmas shopping in the boutiques nearby, few would have had reason to wonder what was going on in the building, which held an unmarked office provided by the Italian military intelligence organization Servizio per le Informazioni e la Sicurezza Militare (SISMI). Nor would passers-by have likely recognized among the men two Pentagon officials and key figures in the post-9/11 push to redraw the political map of the Middle East. Rome’s centro storico, locus of a few millennia of international intrigue, was the perfect setting for the business at hand.

Though little-known outside the Beltway, the Pentagon officials, Larry Franklin and Harold Rhode, were at the height of their powers among a small, tight-knit coterie of Washington Iran hawks determined, in the wake of 9/11, to push for regime change not just in Kabul and Baghdad, but in Tehran as well. Farsi speakers both, they had become increasingly influential as advisers to top Pentagon officials consumed with planning a response to the terror attacks. Franklin was the Iran desk officer in a Pentagon policy office that would eventually include the Office of Special Plans, an alternative intelligence shop that became closely allied with Ahmed Chalabi and his band of Iraqi exile informants. Joining the pair in Rome was Michael Ledeen, a neoconservative historian and activist who is among the most impassioned advocates for overthrowing the Iranian regime.

Given that Italian intelligence was hosting the gathering, protocol would have called for the CIA to be involved and the U.S. Embassy to be notified. Yet no one from Langley or Foggy Bottom had been invited—and for good reason. Among those who had come to meet with the Pentagon team was an Iranian exile who was not exactly an unknown quantity in Washington. Manucher Ghorbanifar, an arms dealer, intelligence peddler, and former military intelligence official in the Shah’s regime, had been a key figure in the Reagan-era Iran-Contra scandal, in which Washington secretly sold missiles to Iran’s Islamic rulers. Even before that, he had been so unreliable as a CIA informant that the agency had issued a “burn notice” directing agency personnel not to deal with him. When, in the midst of Iran-Contra, the CIA gave Ghorbanifar a polygraph test, he was deemed not to be showing deception on only 2 of the 15 questions—his name and his place of birth.

“One test of a source is his ability to tell you something accurate that cannot be known through any other means,” Bill Murray, the former CIA station chief in France, told me. Ghorbanifar not only has never been able to do that, Murray said, “he has a proven track record of fabrication—making up the information he reports from his own imagination.” Washington insiders of a certain vintage cringe at the mention of Ghorbanifar’s name—and grow alarmed when they hear that, as another ex-CIA official puts it, “anyone in the U.S. government would still talk to Ledeen and Ghorbanifar after what happened.”

But someone was. For three days, the international group met to discuss Middle East political machinations, alleged Iran-backed terrorism threats, and, most of all, rumors of discontent and divided loyalties in the Iranian security services. Even as Chalabi and company were spinning tales in Washington about how Saddam’s regime would collapse with only a minor effort from the United States, the administration’s Iran hawks were eager to hear the same about Tehran—and to that end, Ghorbanifar had delivered a special guest. The guest was “a very high-level ex-Revolutionary Guard,” Ghorbanifar later told me. “His situation was so high that the Italian intelligence network, in order to prove he had a special mission to Italy, created a kind of fake cover itinerary to give him an excuse to the Iranian authorities.”

CIA sources are unconvinced. “They drag these guys out and say they’re from the Revolutionary Guard,” Tyler Drumheller, the former CIA director for Europe, told me. “In fact, they’re actually from some rug store. In any city, it’s an industry.”

Rhode and Franklin, in any event, were impressed. As the meeting was breaking up, Rhode sent a classified cable from the telex room of the U.S. Embassy in Rome back to the Pentagon, reporting that the group had “made contact with Iranian intelligence officers who anticipate possible regime change in Iran and want to establish contact with the United States government.” The cable, portions of which were obtained by Knight Ridder’s Washington bureau, continued, “A sizable financial interest is required.”

Intelligence sources have their suspicions about what the money was to go for. “My thought is that he was trying to do a Chalabi, asking them to tell the president that there’s Iranians waiting to rise up,” one former U.S. intelligence official told me. “It would be comical except that they have a lot of money, and people pay a lot of attention. All they need is purchase someplace, and the virus spreads very quickly.”

Just how far did it spread? In the four years since the Rome meeting, the Pentagon has refused to answer many questions about it, including those from congressional investigators examining whether the trip constituted an unauthorized “intelligence activity” by the Bush administration. It has also insisted that the meeting’s purpose was merely to follow up on a tip about threats to U.S. forces in Afghanistan, and that the Ghorbanifar intelligence pipeline was quickly shut down.

The real story, as I learned in the course of a two-year investigation that took me from sterile Washington offices to smoky exile pubs in Paris, is more interesting. It’s also not over. As the crisis with Iran deepens and moves to the fore, the Bush administration is putting in place key elements of the vision spun in part by the men at the Rome meeting. In a new campaign to ramp up pressure on the Iranian regime, millions of dollars are pouring into exile groups, anti-regime propaganda, pro-democracy projects, and intelligence gathering. State Department and intelligence personnel are being deployed to the region and new Iran operations offices are being “stood up” in the State Department and Pentagon—the latter even featuring some of the names familiar from the pre-Iraq-war Office of special Plans.

In his 1988 memoir of the Iran-Contra affair, Perilous Statecraft, Ledeen described the role of the “trusted envoy,” a kind of freelance government agent who shuttles between world leaders with few of the constraints of a government job but all of the thrill. “There are certain kinds of secret information that move between friendly countries quite outside the routine channels of government,” he wrote. “The bearers of these messages can be anything from businessmen and journalists to actors and trusted personal assistants; they are rarely top officials themselves. Frequently, their names do not even appear on official calendars or appointment schedules; they are slipped in between the formal appointments, or they are ushered into the leaders’ private residences on weekends or after dinner.”

It was the kind of role Ledeen, who counts among his contacts Karl Rove and National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley, has relished for 20 years. Having come of age in the 1960s at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he says he was friendly with the activists who helped launch Students for a Democratic Society, he later became an avid anticommunist. While living in Italy in the 1970s, he was a political historian, a correspondent for The New Republic, and a consultant to SISMI on terrorism issues. Adventurous, impatient, and seemingly unconstrained by the professional boundaries of any of his multiple avocations, Ledeen eventually worked in the Reagan administration at the National Security Council, where he helped set up the Iran-Contra missile sales to Tehran—and became a close ally of Ghorbanifar, Washington’s liaison to the Islamic regime.

Ledeen—who has argued in many articles and media appearances that Tehran is the chief sponsor of Islamic terrorism—is part of a subclan of neoconservatives for whom Iran is not an afterthought to Iraq but has long been the primary target. For almost a quarter century, these hardliners have been waiting for Washington to go on the offensive against the Islamic Republic. But to engineer such a radical shift, to outmaneuver a CIA and State Department gone soft on the mullahs, as they saw it, they had to introduce the Pentagon and the White House to an alternate intelligence network—much as Chalabi and his Iraqi National Congress had done with their clique of Iraq “insiders.” In that pursuit, the Rome back channel was the opening gambit.

As several iran-contra histories and congressional investigations relate, Ghorbanifar has alternately bedeviled and infuriated most every U.S. official who ever dealt with him. Reagan’s own national security adviser, Bud McFarlane, once said that while Ghorbanifar “seemed to have a rather agile and creative mind for intrigue,” he was “corrupt, duplicitous…not to be trusted.” Even Ledeen himself admits to never having figured out what Ghorbanifar was really up to: “Was he, as some have suggested, an infiltrator within the ranks of the émigrés…? Was he simply looking for useful contacts in the hopes of reviving his business career…? Or was he a man with a fairly consistent political agenda, constantly searching for some way to change the policies of the Iranian government…? The very fact that even those who worked quite closely with him wonder about his real identity testifies to the complexity of his personality and the cunning of which he is capable.”

With a persona somewhere between a salesman and a Syriana-style operative, Ghorbanifar operates in a twilight world of exiles, international arms dealers, front companies, passports in multiple names and nationalities, and Swiss bank accounts, all suffused with a kind of desperate con artistry based on the larger dysfunction of the U.S.-Iranian relationship of the past quarter century. For 25 years now, Ghorbanifar has been selling American conservatives on the promise of regime change in Tehran; at the same time, and with the tacit knowledge of his U.S. partners, he has operated as a freelance agent of that regime.

Looking with his enormous mustache, balding pate, and cigar like a wheeler-dealer out of central casting, the 60-year-old Ghorbanifar lives with his family in Nice and maintains a Paris presence through an aging aide who happens to be Iran’s former minister of commerce. In conversation he is cajoling, flattering, with a glint of a sharper edge beneath. “When you come to Paris, we will chat for hours,” he told me. The intelligence he has given his American contacts has been “1 million percent” accurate. For $20 million, he would open doors all over Tehran for his American paymasters. And so on.

During Iran-Contra, Ghorbanifar conveyed Iran’s weapons wish list to the Americans, via Ledeen. In return for sophisticated missiles to be used in Iran’s war against Iraq, he promised, Tehran would intervene to gain the release of U.S. hostages held by Hezbollah in Lebanon; what’s more, he told his American and Israeli contacts, the weapons sales would bolster regime moderates, in the midst then, he claimed, of a power struggle.

Disgraced in Washington along with his coconspirators, Ghorbanifar faded from view in the late 1980s. His associates in France say that he has continued to set up import-export projects, including a recent deal in Spain to sell peas to Sudan, and that his business of late has involved trips to Iraq. He is also known to have maintained a relationship with a company in Milan called Atlas Trading, according to U.S. intelligence sources. The company, Corriere della Sera journalist and terrorism expert Guido Olimpio told me, is one of several that acquire technology from Europe on behalf of the Iranian regime—marking another instance of Ghorbanifar serving the rulers whom he simultaneously seeks to help overthrow.

To Ghorbanifar, as to his American friends, 9/11 offered a chance for vindication. Ledeen has said that not long after the attacks he got a call from Ghorbanifar offering information—from his brother Ali, who once ran a rug store in Paris—about a threat to U.S. forces in Afghanistan; it was that tip that would provide the ostensible reason for the Rome meeting. Also among Ghorbanifar’s intelligence wares was a tip about an alleged Iranian threat to assassinate former president George H.W. Bush, which the Secret Service checked out and deemed useless, as well as a bizarre tale about smugglers getting sick from radiation poisoning after transporting highly enriched uranium from Iraq to Iran back in the 1990s.

But it was one thing for Ghorbanifar to rekindle his rapport with Ledeen; it was another to get the Bush administration to start paying attention. That would require more strategizing—and as Douglas Feith, the Pentagon’s undersecretary for policy, noted in a 2004 letter to the Washington Monthly, the initiative did not come from the Pentagon. “DoD learned from the White House that there were some Iranians who had information about terrorist threats to U.S. forces in Afghanistan and who wanted to defect,” Feith wrote. “It turned out that the Iranians did not want to defect, but they did want to share information directly with the U.S. Government. The Iranians did not, however, want to deal with the CIA.” It was classic Ghorbanifar-Ledeen fare—the hint to the White House, the handoff to the Pentagon, the quickly deflated promises, the end run around the CIA.

Not that the CIA had any desire to be involved. CIA headquarters “was extremely goosey about this,” a former senior agency official knowledgeable about the Rome meeting told me. “You don’t want to be sucked into Iran-Contra. Many of us were around when that happened, and went over a cliff with them. [Then-CIA Director George] Tenet was on the Senate intelligence committee staff when that happened. The answer from Langley was: We don’t want anything to do with this.” When the CIA learned that the Rome meeting was going ahead, its local station chief even fired off a memo to Langley reporting that an unauthorized covert action might be taking place—a memo that would eventually find its way into the files of Senate staffers investigating the matter. The State Department likewise complained to the White House, and then-Deputy National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley reportedly promised that the channel would be shut down. (Hadley’s office has referred questions about the meeting to the Defense Department, where spokeswoman Lt. Colonel Tracy O’Grady Walsh first told me to email questions, then did not respond.)

Despite the complaints, it appears that the dalliance between U.S. government officials and Ghorbanifar continued beyond the Rome meeting. Rhode would travel to Paris in June 2003 to meet with Ghorbanifar again—a meeting the Pentagon later claimed was “unplanned.” Also in June 2003, three months after the U.S. invasion of Iraq, a CIA case officer was sent to meet in Baghdad with a Ghorbanifar associate known to U.S. intelligence officials as a London-based fraudster. As Newsday’s Knut Royce—who first broke the story of the Rome meeting in 2003—discovered, Ghorbanifar and his associate claimed to have information about a secret cache of weapons-grade uranium in Iraq that Iranian intelligence had allegedly discovered and stolen part of.

At their tense meeting in Iraq, the CIA officer gave the associate a series of test questions, all of which he flunked. Then the officer asked him to provide a small sample of the uranium. He refused and walked out. “He’s a fabricator,” a former U.S. intelligence official told Royce. “These fabricators were produced by Ghorbanifar. They read headlines, try to cater to your fears, and they draw from real facts.”

Ghorbanifar had better luck with Rep. Curt Weldon (R-Pa.), who has met with him in Paris and has now published most of his claims in a book, Countdown to Terror, that promises to reveal Iran as “the iron glove behind all our enemies.” Weldon’s main source, a mysterious Iranian whom the congressman code-names “Ali,” is, in fact, Ghorbanifar’s longtime business partner and personal secretary, Fereidoun Mahdavi. (“Dear Curt,” begins one memo from “Ali” that Weldon quotes in the book. “I confirm again a terrorist attack within the United States is planned before the American elections.”) Mahdavi, in turn, told me that the information he gave Weldon came from Ghorbanifar, who appears to have used him as a kind of cutout—a vehicle for laundering intelligence. U.S. intelligence sources confirmed to me that Weldon has identified Mahdavi as his source. Weldon, they say, has also demanded that Mahdavi be put on the U.S. payroll.

“Anything involving Ghorbanifar is always going to cost a lot of money,” former Paris CIA station chief Murray told me after Weldon’s book appeared. “His usual first ploy is to try to set up an expensive front company allegedly to do business with Iran. That means you pay for the company and whatever is sold and Ghorbanifar does the business, keeps the books, and uses the ‘profits’ to fund his nonexistent group in Iran: in short, himself. Some people always fall for it, but nothing ever comes out of it.”

On july 9, 2004, the Democratic vice chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, Senator Jay Rockefeller, stepped to the podium in the Senate Radio and TV Gallery to announce the release of his committee’s first report on the intelligence community’s pre-Iraq-war mistakes. The report tore into the CIA, finding that the intelligence community had consistently “overstated” the threat of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. But it stopped short of looking at the most troubling issues raised by those failures, chief among them whether the administration had cherry-picked intelligence that served its agenda; those issues would be addressed in a Phase II report that would not be released until after the presidential election. Among the specific targets of that probe, according to a February 2004 document agreed to by the committee, were the still-mysterious intelligence activities of the Feith operation at the Pentagon. Committee investigators were intrigued by documents they had obtained about the Rome meeting, including the cable mentioning a “sizable financial interest.” Under U.S. law, notes one committee staffer, the committee is to be notified of any government intelligence activities. “So if they are conducting intelligence activities and didn’t inform us, that’s unlawful.”(In a separate effort, Democrats on the House Appropriations Committee in 2003 persuaded that committee’s chairman, Rep. Bill Young [R-Fla.], to investigate the activities of Feith’s office and the Ghorbanifar pipeline, but committee Republicans eventually killed the probe.)

Two years later, the Phase II investigation is still barely limping along. Last August, Senate Select Committee on Intelligence Chairman Pat Roberts (R-Kan.), a close White House ally, delayed the process once more by turning the Feith probe over to the Pentagon’s inspector general for an inquiry with no specific deadline. By last November, Senate Democrats were so frustrated they literally shut down the Senate until Roberts promised to get things moving. Feith departed the Pentagon in the summer of 2005; even before then, his office had stopped responding to any questions from the Senate committee about its activities, including the Rome meeting. “They freaked out at Defense,” the Senate staffer told me. “They said, ‘If you’re starting a criminal probe, we are not going to cooperate.’”

To many who saw the Iran-Contra scandal unfold, it all adds up to a familiar picture. Jonathan Winer worked for a Senate committee led by John Kerry that, in the mid-1980s, probed rumors of the secret arms deals and of the funneling of the profits to Nicaragua’s right-wing Contra rebels. For years as the investigation continued, critics—led by then-congressman Dick Cheney—“called us conspiracy nuts,” says Winer. The committee kept hearing tips about private individuals secretly carrying out the government’s business, he recalls. “officials tell you none of it is true, because there’s no record that any of these things took place. It creates a situation where oversight is practically impossible because official reality is completely misleading, and unofficial reality—which is the truth—does not exist.” In the end, the scandal was uncovered after control of Congress shifted to the Democrats and, simultaneously, more and more evidence was revealed in Iran-Contra-related lawsuits and media investigations.

“What has to happen is, you have to have the press and Congress and the courts all playing their constitutional role for the truth to come out,” Winer says. “If any of those components don’t function, you can wind up with serious problems.”

Comparisons between Ghorbanifar and Chalabi—and there have been a few, from sources including Ledeen himself—are imperfect; for one thing, Ghorbanifar has never shown political ambition. Yet there’s a striking parallel in the way that Pentagon hawks relentlessly promoted both players long after they had been deemed unreliable and possibly treacherous by other agencies, in particular the CIA. The difference is that Chalabi’s fictions have been exposed in a bloody and costly war, while Iran action is only now moving toward the front burner. And as it does, the notion that Ledeen and other Iran hawks have advocated for so long—that Iran’s regime will fall if only the United States will give it a push—is emerging as the main policy trajectory for the Bush administration. In February, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice requested an additional $75 million for promoting democracy in Iran; that same month, a team of U.S. government Iran experts traveled to Los Angeles to talk to exiles there. State Department Iran watchers are being “forward deployed” to the Persian Gulf and surrounding region; in Washington, think tanks and exile groups are launching Iran initiatives, all of them jostling for the money and launching whisper campaigns against their competitors in a game whose stakes have suddenly risen. More covert measures are also reportedly under way, including the cultivating of proxies among the Kurds and some of Iran’s ethnic tribes to gather intelligence in the border regions of Iran; and there have been reports that some in the administration believe missile strikes against Iran’s nuclear program would embarrass the regime and lead to a revolution.

For the irrepressible Ledeen, none of this is quite enough. “I was recently asked if I saw signs of action,” Ledeen told me in April. “I see nothing.” Not much later, when the exile community buzzed with stories to the effect that Ledeen was involved in a new back channel to Iran’s rulers, and that Vice President Cheney had authorized the Pentagon to use Ghorbanifar as a source, he shrugged off both rumors. “I can’t imagine it. The Pentagon cannot, so far as I know, do intelligence operations without getting the approval of the CIA. It’s impossible and illegal.” Then he excused himself—he was headed out of town, to Italy, on vacation.https://www.motherjones.com/politics/20 ... days-rome/

The group and its origins sound innocuous enough. But the Home School Legal Defense Association (HSLDA) — a right-wing group founded 36 years ago — has deepened connections between America’s religious right and Russians even as the latter have been sanctioned by the United States, according to a ThinkProgress investigation.

By networking with Russians, the HSLDA — now America’s largest right-wing homeschooling association — has provided the Kremlin with a new avenue of influence over some of the most conservative organizations in the United States.

And while investigations by Special Counsel Robert Mueller, intelligence organizations, and congressional committees have focused on Russia’s efforts to influence U.S. elections, Russian ties to groups like the HSLDA demonstrate the Kremlin’s broader attempts to hold sway over American policies.

Other ties between sanctioned Russians and the American far-right are well documented. From Christian fundamentalists to white supremacists to secession movements to fascists in the so-called “alt-right,” the links are as diffuse as they are damning. Not only have these networks brought Russian agents into close contact with higher-ups in the Republican party, but they’ve presented some of the primary threads of the Kremlin’s efforts at upending and unwinding American democracy.

But at the same time that details — and criticism — of these links between Russia and American right-wing groups were emerging, the HSLDA co-sponsored a formal homeschooling conference in Moscow and St. Petersburg, ThinkProgress found. One of the conference’s other sponsors was a foundation run by sanctioned Russian oligarch Konstantin Malofeev. The event featured some of the most outspoken anti-LGBTQ officials in Russia, and included a Russian official who’s currently sanctioned by the U.S. for her role in stoking Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

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This Global Home Education Conference, which hosted more than 1,000 attendees from over 20 countries, provided a platform for these Russian officials and their networks to work with leaders of America’s homeschooling movement — all of it taking place as Russian links with the American far-right continue to spill out elsewhere.

Sanctioning homeschoolers

Since its founding in 1983, the Virginia-based HSLDA has become America’s most prominent homeschooling organization. The group, which advocates on behalf of homeschooling families, has a right-wing religious bent. It describes its employees as “Christians who seek to honor God” in their work. Its founder, Michael Farris, has described homeschooling as “a way to obey God’s command to teach our children to love God.”

“HSLDA has pretty much always existed… for the religious right to train up kids to take over in politics.”

“[HSLDA] is probably the major player who’s driven American homeschooling in the last 30 years, and they’ve always been a very far-right, religious-right organization,” said Kathryn Brightbill, a legislative analyst with the Coalition for Responsible Home Education, a nonprofit that advocates for accountability in homeschooling. “HSLDA has pretty much always existed in part to create that next generation of soldiers for the religious right to train up kids to take over in politics,” she said.

As it grew into the most prominent homeschooling organization in the U.S., it attracted the attention of Russians leading efforts to build relationships with the American far-right.

Russians and the American right started plotting in 1995. We have the notes from the first meeting.

These groups and individuals would help obscure the true nature of Moscow’s kleptocratic dictatorship to Americans, especially to segments of the American right. In 2014, the Kremlin pushed these relationships further: as U.S.-Russian relations fractured following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine that year, Russians close to the Kremlin looked to propel themselves directly into the types of groups and movements pushing “traditional values,” especially within the American religious right.

One of these groups, the World Congress of Families (WCF), played an outsize role linking sanctioned Russian officials to the broader U.S. religious right. The WCF, which the Southern Poverty Law Center has designated a hate group, is a joint Russian-American project that reportedly receives funding from sanctioned Russian oligarchs like Malofeev and Vladimir Yakunin, the latter of whom is the former head of Russian Railways and a close Putin confidant.

The WCF took credit for helping pass a 2011 Russian law restricting abortion access, and has likewise helped build an international coalition of anti-LGBTQ forces. It boasts some 50 membership organizations who pay dues, including the Alliance Defending Freedom and Family Research Council, which are also designated hate groups by the SPLC. The WCF took credit for helping push Russia’s 2013 “Anti-Propaganda Law,” which effectively demonizes the entire LGBTQ community.

In 2014, the WCF announced it would host its annual conference in Moscow. (The group’s most recent conference, which ThinkProgress covered, was held in Moldova, and featured many of the same Russian figures who joined the HSLDA in Russia last year.) After the U.S. began issuing sanctions on Russia in 2014 in response to Russia’s annexation of Crimea and Russian funding for separatists in Ukraine, the WCF announced it would no longer be organizing the conference, citing concerns about potentially breaching those sanctions.

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But the conference was held anyway, and appeared almost identical to what the WCF had originally planned. And while some American groups like the Concerned Women for America decided to skip the conference, a number of Americans showed up — including Michael Donnelly, the HSLDA’s director of global outreach.

The HSLDA didn’t publicize Donnelly’s visit to Russia. (Other groups, like Texas secessionists, have also traveled to Russia in recent years while refraining from posting anything publicly about their visits.) But Brightbill, with the Coalition for Responsible Home Education, discovered that Donnelly followed through on his pledge to speak at the conference.

In a series of Facebook posts that Brightbill uncovered, Donnelly wrote that he “met with senior leaders of the [Russian] Orthodox Church.” As Donnelly noted on Facebook, “[The] family conference I’m attending today is being held at the Kremlin and says a lot at least on its face about the value of family in Russian government.”

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Donnelly confirmed he attended the conference, writing in a text message that he was “there on official business.”

Donnelly’s visit, Brightbill said, was “super hush-hush.” And for good reason: In 2014, Americans’ ties to Russia were suddenly under U.S. scrutiny. Russia had just invaded Ukraine and supplied separatists with weaponry that brought down Malaysian Air Flight MH17, killing 298 people.

But for those following Russian outreach efforts to the American far-right, that 2014 conference was a turning point. It marked a moment in which Russia “[took] on the mantle of leadership of global social conservatism,” said scholar Chris Stroop, an expert on links between between Russia and the American religious right who received a doctorate from Stanford in Russian history.

Enemies of America, friends of the HSLDA

By 2018, those ties between the HSLDA and networks of sanctioned Russians had continued, and had deepened. One of the primary links between the HSLDA and sanctioned Russian officials is Alexey Komov. A Russian national, Komov speaks fluent English and has spent the past few years as the official Russian representative to the WCF. He also works directly for Malofeev — a man nicknamed “God’s oligarch” for his role in financing religious-right ventures in Russia and abroad. Malofeev is also currently under U.S. sanctions for having helped fund separatists in eastern Ukraine.

Alexey Komov and Elena Milskaya, both of whom work for sanctioned Russian oligarch Konstantin Malofeev, huddle at last year's homeschooling conference in Russia. CREDIT: GHEXKomov helped the HSLDA bring the annual Global Home Education Conference to Russia last May — the first time the conference was hosted there. The decision effectively represented the culmination of Russia’s efforts to liaise with the American right-wing homeschooling movement. One of the outlets that promoted the conference was a pro-Kremlin site called Russian Faith, which is run by the rabidly anti-Semitic Charles Bausman; another WCF adviser, Pavel Parfentiev, who claimed credit for Russia’s ban on adoptions by LGBTQ couples, also spoke at the conference.

Donnelly said the 2018 conference wasn’t specifically an HSLDA project, but that HSLDA was simply one of the event’s co-sponsors. He also said that HSLDA provided no direct financial support for the conference. “The conference is a project supported by HSLDA, but it’s not HSLDA [as] the organization that actually did the conference,” he told ThinkProgress. “We felt that [Russia] was a good place to go — and it turns out it was.”

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But it appears the HSLDA played an important role in organizing the conference: The official contact for the conference is an HSLDA email address, and the conference’s official webpage was registered by the HSLDA.

“[Komov] was the primary organizer, Russian organizer, of this homeschooling event,” said Allan Carlson, one of the WCF’s co-founders and a speaker at the conference. “The chief American sponsoring group was the… HSLDA.”

Conferencing with the Kremlin

The conference, held in St. Petersburg and Moscow, billed itself as a “forum to cultivate awareness about home education, its legal framework, social and academic research, and practical experience around the world.” It was, according to the official page, “hugely successful.” Or as Carlson put it: “I think it was a very significant event.”

“[It] makes sense that we would find the leaders of America’s Christofascist homeschooling movement networking with Russians with whom they share ideological affinity.”

And that may have been true, in the context of homeschooling. But it was also a coup for sanctioned Russians seeking to connect with the American right.

One of the conference’s official co-sponsors, alongside the HSLDA and the far-right Alliance Defending Freedom, was Malofeev’s St. Basil the Great Charitable Foundation. And among the speakers — which included some of Russia’s most well-known anti-LGBTQ figures, like Dmitri Smirnov — was Yelena Mizulina, a Russian official sanctioned by the U.S. and widely credited for helping lead Moscow’s lurch toward far-right social policies over the past decade.

As the Obama White House announced when sanctioning Mizulina in 2014, she was partly responsible for “contributing to the crisis in Ukraine,” alongside Russian ultra-nationalists like Dmitry Rogozin and Sergey Glazyev. The Trump White House has continued to sanction Mizulina.

Donnelly told ThinkProgress that the HSLDA has “no links with sanctioned Russian officials and oligarchs.”

Sanctioned Russian official Yelena Mizulina, seen here at last year's WCF conference in Moldova, has been sanctioned by the U.S. since 2014. CREDIT: CASEY MICHELBut in an interview with Pravoslavie, a website focused on Russian Orthodox affairs, Donnelly specifically pointed to Mizulina — who’s now in her fifth year under American sanctions — as a model partner for the HSLDA. “I think that Russia has a bright future in the field of family education,” Donnelly said. “[Russia has] official and very influential people who support this idea. For example, Yelena Mizulina.”

Brightbill noted that Mizulina’s support for homeschooling appears to be part of a broader Russian playbook, especially when it comes to building alliances with American far-right groups. “That probably plays a big part in what they were doing with Russia, and how they became so easily played by Russia, since Russian officials are telling them that they are on board with this idea of homeschooling as a human right,” Brightbill said.

Some of those who spoke at the conference, such as the WCF’s Carlson, tried to downplay the significance of sanctioned Russian officials’ and oligarchs’ involvement. “The thing just happened,” Carlson said.

Mike Donnelly speaks at last year's homeschooling conference in Russia, which hosted at least one sanctioned Russian official. CREDIT: GHEX“[It] makes sense that we would find the leaders of America’s Christofascist homeschooling movement networking with Russians with whom they share ideological affinity, even though homeschooling, like gun ownership, is uncommon in Russia,” Stroop said, using a term to refer to fundamentalist Christian ideas used in pursuit of totalitarian rule.

Donnelly said the HSLDA’s Russian partners made the decision to host Mizulina. “We didn’t invite her, the locals invited her,” he said. “It was a global event, but the locals had some control over who got to come. They wanted her there because of her support of homeschooling and because she’s very influential.”

But Brightbill doesn’t buy it. “HSLDA has acted as a clearinghouse for all these international homeschool organizations for years, so for them to say — ‘Oh, this isn’t them, they’re not the ones who are involved’ — it’s giving them distance and plausible deniability,” she said.

Donnelly said that it doesn’t necessarily matter that Mizulina is sanctioned, so long as she continues to back homeschooling.

“I’m very supportive of having people who are in power in a country speaking favorably about home education,” he said. “Mizulina, she’s on the sanctions list, but she’s obviously very influential in the Russian Duma. And so if the homeschooling movement in Russia is going to survive and thrive, they need to have support from influential people. And so [the U.S.] may not like Yelena Mizulina as a country for whatever reason, but in Russia she’s very influential, and she’s very interested [in] and supportive of home education.”

Homeschool infiltration

Donnelly added that no American officials have asked him why the HSLDA participated in the 2018 conference, or why the HSLDA co-sponsored an event that featured a sanctioned Russian official like Mizulina.

“If you want to get me in trouble, go ahead and make that the focus of your article.”

“No one’s knocked on my door [to ask why HSLDA co-sponsored an event with Mizulina],” he said. “Maybe they will if you start publicizing it. If you want to get me in trouble, go ahead and make that the focus of your article.”

Alexey Komov (back-center) appears with others at last year's homeschooling conference in Russia. CREDIT: FACEBOOKWhile Donnelly said he has no plans to return to Russia in the foreseeable future, Russians who have been making inroads with the American religious right appear eager to continue their work.

“Our movements have the same issues, the same challenges, and as parents we really want what’s best for children,” Donnelly said in a 2017 video with Komov. “Would you agree that that’s what’s motivating Russian homeschooling?”

“Absolutely,” Komov responded, smiling beneath falling snow. “I think we have very similar issues — and we should be close together.”

American University In Moscow: Linked To Russian State, But Fake Like TrumpU

Grant SternMay 25, 2017Part 5 of a 10 part series: the Grand Old Putin Party

Left: The stock photo of Moscow State University on Lozansky’s website for American University in Moscow.Dr. Edward Lozansky is best known publicly as President of the American University of Moscow.

It is quite possibly the only university more fake than Trump University.

American University in Moscow has no listed courses, and no faculty.

It’s a university only in name, supposedly to hand out diplomas equivalent to an MBA in the US to Russian students.

All you have to do today to get one of these “diplomas” — the Russian flavor of the frequently maligned “participation trophy” — is to keep up on your assignments (propaganda reading) and submit a really good 600-word essay to Professor Ed.

Their official website uses a stock photo of Moscow State University, from Wikipedia.

Research about the physical address Lozanzky lists for his university and open source internet investigation reveals the sham existence of American University in Moscow.

American University in Moscow’s physical addresses also betray links to the very highest levels of the Putin regime.

It all points to one man — Vladislav Surkov — being Dr. Lozansky’s point of contact in the Kremlin.

The Russian professor lists a tiny physical office space at Novy Arbat 15, Suite 2221, Moscow, Russia 119019 in Moscow as its headquarters, which measures only 145 sq. ft. according to this listing of a similar spot.

The Washington Post reported on the 1990 birth of American University in Moscow, and big names were dropped, Presidents were briefed and friends of Premiers involved.

Miraculously, we found a November 4th, 1991 Top Secret cable from the State Department about Lozansky’s university plans, explaining why they chose not to sponsor the American University in Moscow.

American diplomats were dismayed by Popov’s (and by extension Lozansky’s) utter lack of any follow through, and their false claims that President Bush and former British Prime Minister Thatcher sponsored the project — they did not — which resulted in serious discussions about the project between American diplomats with their counterparts from Britain, France and Germany being recorded in a confidential memo.

The school still lists Bush and Thatcher as co-founders today.

Popov is still listed as a co-founder of the still functioning International School, and a player in Moscow politics.

(Ed. Note 6/8/28: The above two links have broken as International School rebranded itself to Moscow International University and removed its historical backstory as seen on May 24, 2017 here in the Internet Archive.)

Lozansky is not listed.

There is also the mystery of former US Ambassador Michael McFaul’s interactions with Russia House and Lozansky’s “University” dating back to his 2012 interview with the group — where they ask him about his working relationship with Vladimir Surkov.

Former US Ambassador to Russia Mike McFaul spent a day at the real International University in Moscow in 2013.

Even though it is nominally supposed to be the same institution, he reports that nobody mentioned Dr. Lozansky, the President of the school.

Lozansky’s public profiles also claim that he’s a Social Scientist at INION — though he’s not found anywhere on their website’s directory, ditto for Moscow State University, which his public websites claim hosts his “American University in Moscow.”

Further public source data investigation shows that Lozansky’s school doesn’t show up in tenant listings of the expensive office building at which it purports to be located in Moscow — where it occupies a rather small space for an entire University — but it is nearby a block of Russian government offices.

Edward Lozansky’s American University in Moscow has these pitifully thin web pages. When it was founded, Lozansky claimed to be sponsored by President Bush and Prime Minister Thatcher, but now he’s substituted former Soviet Premier Gorbachev for Thatcher.American University In Moscow Shares Space With Putin’s Top Eastern Ukrainian Propagandist

The Russian version of the ‘White Pages’ reveals what appear to be some very direct links between Lozansky and the Kremlin, and an integrated Cyber War team between America and Eastern Ukraine.

Research shows Lozansky’s “American University in Moscow” is sharing a large space in a tawny neighborhood with the Center for Liberal Conservative Politics, a think tank which is now run by one of Putin’s top propagandists, Alexander Kazakov.

Kazakov is Deputy Director of the public relations firm ZPK, which works with the Russian Presidential Administration.

Recent news in The Guardian says that Kazakov reports directly from Eastern Ukraine to Putin’s advisor Vladislav Surkov, after his emails were leaked showing frequent contact.

The combination Lozansky’s unusual space sharing arrangement with a propagandist from the Putin-backed Republic of Donetsk, who reports to Vladislav Surkov confirms the opinion of private US intelligence company Stratfor.

Their top Russia analyst — whose emails were pilfered and released by Wikileaks — Lauren Goodrich said that Lozansky worked for Vladislav Surkov all the way back in 2009:

Yea… has a crazy reputation to where ppl say they aren’t sure exactly who he works for. Americans say he is part of the Putin disinformation club and Russians say he is CIA conspiracy… lots of rumors on both sides. I haven’t met him yet, but hear among the inner circles that he is owned by Surkov. His info is too…. pro-Russian underneath.Incidentally, the company Stratfor is founded by one of the Hamilton Trading Group’s founders, itself a CIA contractor unusually hired by the RNC in 2016.

Extensive internet searches turned up very little information about a supposedly 27-year old university.

However, what we did find makes it very likely that Edward Lozansky has gotten away with using a very fake academic credential for a long time.

Furthermore, his claims of the University’s ties to the Russian state, via state run universities raise the same specter of unregistered agency for Russia which has plagued the Trump administration’s failed National Security Advisor Gen. Michael Flynn. In Flynn’s case, he avoided registration because his paymaster was nominally not a state itself, but rather a state linked company.

Here’s the declassified memo from America’s Ambassador to Russia declining to participate in Lozansky’s University in 1991 (original link):

A series of investigative reports The Grand Old Putin Party — co-authored by Grant Stern and Patrick Simpson.

PostScript

If all of the above was not unusual enough, the confidential US diplomatic cables about Lozansky’s American University in Moscow were declassified in 2014–16 showed concern that then-Moscow Mayor Popov was involved in shady real estate deals. That’s why nobody in the American government wanted to sponsor his University.

Amazingly, last March there was a shady real estate deal impacting the building listed on Lozansky’s website as containing the University’s headquarters involving a former Glencore trader — the Swiss oil trading company involved in the Trump Russia dossier — and whose sanction busting activities in the 1980s led to Rudy Giuliani’s prosecution of its founder Marc Rich. Former Mayor Popov wasn’t likely involved, but the short story illustrates how corruption works in Russia, and how few degrees of separation there are between that country’s oligarchy and the international intrigues of our day.

A company named Capital Group arranged to buy the trophy office property where AIUM’s offices are located cheaply, with a no-bid contract, from the current Mayor of Moscow and city government. The founder of Capital Group is Vladislav Doronin — who used to work for Mark Rich at Glencore — whom Russian sources indicate is a company that has ties to organized crime. Doronin also founded the OKO Group, which is an international developer which just made a major splash purchasing several trophy properties for development in Miami, a city whose real estate market has the highest rate of suspicious all cash buyers in America today.

We don’t believe that Lozansky has something directly to do with this shady real estate deal. However, it bore mention that his currently self-reported address isn’t listed in public guides and was subject to an unusual privatization deal only recently.https://thesternfacts.com/american-univ ... d157fa234f

Patrick SimpsonMay 25, 2017Part 4 of a 10 part series: the Grand Old Putin Party

Dr. Edward Lozansky is a key figure in the Trump-Russia scandal, despite his name being a mystery to you.

Meet Eduard Dmitrievich Lozansky, a US citizen and potentially an unregistered foreign agent for the Russian Federation.

He is prolific Putin propagandist.

A citizen of America.

And he is the key man who introduced the Republican Party’s conservative movement to Russia.

This report is not about his pro-Putin political beliefs, but rather it documents his high-profile career in Washington, D.C. that focused upon courting Republican politicians and networking with high ranking members of the Republican conservative movement, which began in 1977 almost immediately after he emigrated from Moscow to Rome to Rochester, N.Y.

Edward Lozansky is so deeply ingratiated into the Republican Party, that his World Russia Forum has regularly been held in the Senate’s Hart Office Building.

In the early 2000s, he facilitated direct lobbying from the Russian government of America’s Congress, while asserting strangely that he’s not a lobbyist, on his lobbying.ru website profile.

According to his early 2004 biography, Dr. Lozansky is a native of Kiev, Ukraine. Interestingly, Lozansky deleted his Ukrainian-roots from his own official biography shortly after the Orange Revolution later that year, according to a review of saved pages over time from Archive.org.

In 2006, the Boston Globe characterized his Russia House as a consultancy business in his biography in an op-editorial he wrote about a meeting between President Bush and President Putin.

In March 1991, an American firm registering as a foreign agent for Russia named interacting with Russia House their sole duty, because they say it was the official trade ministry of the former Soviet government.

Just six months later, many of America’s top conservative activists got escorted by Lozansky straight to the top of the Russian political system, only months after an August 1991 coup deposed the former Soviet government.

He’s prolific in turning out pro-Putin propaganda and advocating for the normalization of Russian relations with the United States, without concern for human rights, corruption or the illegal annexation of half of the sovereign state of his birth.

And this is about the unusual set of factually documented circumstances which lead to a pair of shocking conclusions:

Dr. Lozansky’s operated the foundational groups of Russian lobbying in the United States, became officially supported by US military think tanks and held decades worth of events in the Senate’s own office buildings, becoming personal friends with many of the founders of top Republican think tanks and organizations.Dr. Lozansky is most likely one Vladimir Putin’s Chief Advisors in the Russian Federation’s CyberWar against the United States. At the very least, his ideas — including books published by the Russian Foreign Ministry — form the basis for the “special war” we saw deployed against the United States’ 2016 election.He had rather unusual access to the highest levels of the Soviet Union after having departed as a “dissident,” when emigres typically faced retribution for betraying the State.

He’s a visiting instructor at the Honors College at the University of South Florida, a senior research associate with the Postsecular Conflicts Project based at University of Innsbruck, Austria. He said:

“It would certainly indicate that the Soviets were letting Lozansky out for a reason. That’s a good reason to examine his background as a possible agent of influence.”“An exit visa for someone with Lozansky’s educational background would be highly unusual.”In fact, allowing a highly educated physicist who trained at the top nuclear to depart the Soviet Union at all is highly unusual, but his anti-communist activities kept him in the highest circles of power in Washington D.C.’s conservative movement for decades.

Ed Lozansky also currently sits on the board of the Eurasia Center and runs the World Russia Forum.

Lozansky also associated himself with the dubious American non-profit corporation “American Institute of the Ukraine” who unceremoniously yanked its website last year, and he’s a member of the “American Council for Kosovo.”

He also founded “Russia House” in DC, a consulting group whose mission is to “bring decision makers together” where he has hosted annual World Russia Forums every year since 1981.

Dr. Lozansky told Reason.com (then Reason magazine) in 1981 that he had a “flair for public relations work.”

Lozansky has used that prowess to deliver an endless stream of pro-Putin propaganda, while hiding behind a multiplicity of facades, and publishing on The Nation, Sputnik, Izvestia, Echo.ru, the Washington Times and as a frequent commenter on Pravda, increasingly on Russian television and through numerous other outlets including his little read Kontinent website.

Lozansky’s Improbable, But Factual Story Of Departing The Soviet Union

The New York Times reported that Dr. Lozansky was part of the prestigious Kurchatov Institute, where most of the Soviet nuclear weapons were designed.

He fled the Soviet Union for the USA in the late 1970’s, purportedly for getting caught criticizing the Communist regime, purportedly for speaking about Nobel Prize-winning physicist Andrei Sakharov’s ideas.

Physicist Ed Lozansky parlayed his conspicuously fantastic personal story about fleeing the Soviet Union as a dissident scientist — which even the Poughkeepsie newspapers noted contemporaneously — into getting his Congressional representative Frank Horton (R-NY) to make a resolution to the floor of the House of Representatives. (see page 57)

Except from 1979 article “Teacher who hated Russian system would leave job, family again”Horton asked President Carter to secure the passage of his family in May 1979.

It worked.

President Jimmy Carter personally, and directly lobbied Soviet Premier Brezhnev at the 1979 US-Russia summit to sign the SALT II nuclear arms treaty in Vienna weeks later, but to no avail.

Later that year, he arranged for nearly all of the Nobel Prize Winners — including Mother Teresa — to sign a letter to the Soviets begging for the release of his family.

Lozansky rapidly cultivated very important ties in Washington’s halls of power after that, meeting and befriending Senators Bob Dole &Jack Kemp who would later run for president, and Billy Graham and Mark Levin.

In the early 1980’s, Senators Dole and Kemp helped Lozansky’s wife to obtain an exit visa from the Soviet Union, to legally emigrate to the United States.

But only after conducting a public “marriage in absentia” for the news media, ostensibly to embarrass the Soviets.

Senator Dole campaigned to be President in 1996 with Jack Kemp as his running mate.

Taken from the 1996 Dole/Kemp Presidential campaign website, itself an interesting web time capsule :http://www.dolekemp96.org/main.htmPresident Ronald Reagan set up a meeting between Lozansky and then-Vice President George H.W. Bush on May 26th, 1982. Weeks later, Edward Lozansky’s wife was freed and she came to the United States.

In 1982 Lozansky secured his wife’s exit visa and turned his story into a book called “For Tatiana” which told his true life international love story with a high ranking Soviet General’s daughter, a Communist Romeo and Juliet.

He sold the book deal and movie rights for the money used to buy the Washington DC property a few blocks from the White House which he named, “Russia House.”

Dr. Lozansky formed the Andrei Sakharov Institute in 1983, to advocate for quarantined Soviet dissident physicist Andrei Sakharov, and he became its Executive Director

Bob Dole and Jack Kemp were listed as members of the board.

Vladimir Bukovsky served on the board of Lozansky’s Sakharov Institute, right around the time he formed what could be best described as an American propaganda group, Resistance International, which received considerable funding from Congress. Both groups also shared Robert Conquest and Reagan Administration neoconservative Richard Perle as members.

Some of the early World Russia Forums were co-sponsored by Resistance International.

Amazingly, in 1989 his father-in-law told the New York Times that the Soviet Union forgave him for Lozansky betraying the state; it’s a story is that strains credulity, because the former Communist state wasn’t known for its leniency, but rather its vindictiveness.

By 1998 Lozansky’s Russia House had become a fixture in DC’s scene of all things Russian.

In 2010 the Washington Post reported that Ed and Tatiana Lozansky renewed their vows — in Moscow.

Dr. Lozansky was very involved in advocating for the issues of Russian Jewry, which is how he became friends with men like Sandy Gradinger in Rochester

Startlingly, Dr. Lozansky’s most important political relationship was with a conservative activist whose connections to Hungarian Nazis have only been equaled by Donald Trump.

Edward Lozansky teamed up frequently with Heritage Foundation co-founder Paul Weyrich, a man whose right-hand man was a member of the Hungarian Arrow Cross, and whose groups were politically active in European far-right politics.

For example, here’s just one article Lozansky and Weyrich co-authored in 2001.

In 2008, Paul Weyrich wrote an op/ed on Newsmax (since removed) where he stated that it was Ed Lozansky who 20-years prior brought up to him the idea of Russia joining NATO.

Wikipedia sums up Paul Weyrich’s Nazi connections thusly:

Weyrich founded the Committee for the Survival of a Free Congress (CSFC),[5] an organization that trained and mobilized conservative activists, recruited conservative candidates, and raised funds for conservative causes.The CSFC, founded by Weyrich, “became active in eastern European politics after the Cold War. Figuring prominently in this effort was Weyrich’s right-hand man, Laszlo Pasztor, a former leader of the pro-Nazi Arrow Cross Party in Hungary, which had collaborated with Hitler’s Reich. After serving two years in prison for his Arrow Cross activities, Pasztor found his way to the United States, where he was instrumental in establishing the ethnic-outreach arm of the Republican national Committee.”[8]In addition to his Nazi activities, Paul Weyrich coined the term the “Moral Majority”

He also founded the following “mainstream” conservative groups that are still very, very politically active today:

— The Council for National Policy, which is the main umbrella organization of extremist and right-wing organizations. Here’s a Southern Poverty Law Center report about their activities.

— Turned CSFC into the Free Congress Foundation, which is now known as American Opportunity, which advocates a mainstream conservative platform, headed by Va. Governor Jim Gilmour

Dr. Lozansky’s voluminous list of acquaintances overlaps heavily with the Council for National Policy, which is a conservative umbrella organization of right-wing movements in the religious, media, ‘Tea Party’ and anti-taxation movements.

“Weyrich told me directly, at a 1990 conference, how abortion had nothing to do with the rise of the religious right.” Dartmouth Professor Randall Balmer said, telling us about his personal encounter to us with the man at the heart of the modern religious right conservative movement, which he wrote about in depth in Politico.

He said to me, ‘Absolutely, the movement began as a backlash against the loss of tax exemption at segregated religious institutions, specifically Bob Jones University.’

“Nothing got their attention,” the Professor recounted being told by Weyrich, “until we discovered the tax issue.”More importantly, Edward Lozansky’s relationship with Paul Weyrich placed him in contact with the head of every Republican organization of consequence for the last four decades.

In turn, Paul Weyrich ingratiated himself into the upper echelon of Russian politics at the very hour of the downfall of the former Soviet government.

Weyrich expressed great concern in an August 28th, 1991 C-SPAN video about his people in Russia ten days after the Communist government fell— because the KGB considered them part of a spy program — when they lost touch for three days.

One of his people he said was Boris Yeltsin’s “campaign manager” Anatoly Chubais.

Chubais was soon thereafter appointed by Yeltsin to be in charge of the privatization of Russian state assets.

Anatoly Chubais very job involved picking winners and losers in the post-Soviet era, and he even rushed to accelerate Russian privatization sales in the mid-90s.

It’s difficult to describe a twenty-year relationship in a single column, but examining Paul Weyrich’s reaction to the FBI denying visas to World Russia Forum participants provides a window into the importance of these events to this man at the very center of the conservative movement.

He wrote a story entitled “The FBI: Slamming The Door On Important Russian Friends”:

I know it doesn’t pay to get angry in this business. Still, I can’t help being angry over a totally unjustified situation. For the past several years, the Free Congress Foundation, of which I am chairman and CEO, has co-sponsored The Russian Forum with the American University in Moscow and Russia House, both run by Ed Lozansky, a former dissident from Soviet days, who is now welcomed by the Putin government.Last year, only a third of the Russians who applied for visas to participate in the Forum were approved. We understood. It was just six months after September 11. There was increased concern about security. So while it threw our conference into chaos, we didn’t make a federal issue out of it. After the conference, we did supply the list of names of those who were denied visas to then-Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott (R-MS) who promised to take up the matter with the U.S. State Department. We never heard another word from Lott.This year’s Russian Forum was held one week ago. Not a single Russian who applied for a visa was approved. There were, I am told, some fifty applicants who wanted to participate in the conference one way or the other. These are not folks off the street, mind you. Some are Russian businessmen. Others are Members of the State Duma. Then there are those who have served in government, such as officials at the National Academy of Sciences. Still others are academics.While thousands sneak across the US-Mexican border every week and while there are known terrorists lurking about in Canada, hoping to find a way into this country, the place where the brakes are being applied is Moscow.“I’m still angry but I intend to get even.”Paul Weyrich died in 2008.

Right-Wing American Politicians Embraced The Right-Wing Of Russia Politics

First, the Sakharov Institute signed on to a Petition from the Abramoff-linked American Security Council to nix the Anti Ballistic Missile treaty (ABM).

Then the Sakharov institute board voted to dissolve the institute due to a financial dispute between Lozansky and the Sakharov family, not long before the famous scientist passed away in late 1989.

Luckily for Lozansky, right-wing millionaire Robert Krieble was elderly during that time, and about to ready to retire. First, he wanted to destroy the Soviet Union. Krieble reached out to his friend, Paul Weyrich, the Christo-fascist creator of all things far right, and suggested they go to Russia and train people. Weyrich called Jack Wheeler and the wheels began to turn.

Meanwhile, the Soviet Union was doing a fantastic job of failing all on its own.

Pro-Democratic forces in the Soviet Union formed the “Inter-regional deputies group” consisting of Moscow Mayor Popov, Arkady Murashev — who founded the Center For Liberal Conservative Politics (with Robert Krieble) and was a speaker at Lozansky’s 2007 World Russia Forum in DC — and Anatoly Sobchak, Putin’s murdered mentor.

Hearing what Weyrich and Krieble were doing, Dr. Lozansky jumped at the opportunity to further his agenda.

He reached out to Paul Weyrich and offered to provide translation and in November of 1989, the Krieble Institute was formed.

Moscow Mayor Popov Lozansky’s partner in American University in Moscow.Literally, on one day Lozansky made the introductions to Mayor Popov, then the next day, the first training occurred and Lozansky made the claim it was a joint project between his then-called “Free Institute” and Weyrich’s “Free Congress Association.”

A few days later, a meeting of the leaders on both sides occurred and a movement was born.

The missionaries of the right would soon visit Moscow.

In early 1990, Yuri Ossipyan and Arkady Murashev came to the United States, where they met with a verifiable who’s who of the American right, like Dan Quayle, Bob Dole, Jack Kemp, and Jesse Helms.

Paul Weyrich brought them to a meeting of the Council for National Policy in Phoenix before he met with Bush about funding this venture.

In 1990 Lozansky launched the American University of Moscow as a collaboration between the Soviet far right and the American far right.

Throughout the early 1990s, all the major think tanks opened offices in Moscow.

The Heritage Foundation shared a building with Lozansky’s American University of Moscow.

In October 1991, Lozansky opened Russia House at an event with Robert Krieble, Paul Weyrich, and Mayor Popov.

The relationships and connections continued to blossom and Lozansky’s dream of an American-Russian super-alliance seemed to be drawing closer to reality.

When Paul Weyrich died in 2009, Republican Congressman Joe Wilson eulogized him on the floor of Congress thusly:

Rep. Joe Wilson talks about working for the Krieble Institute. He goes on to co-author the Congressional Report on US-Russia relations and attended a few of the World Russia ForumsPaul Manafort Was On the Center of Democracy Board With Edward Lozansky

Research into the innocuous sounding “Center for Democracy” unveiled a few surprises.

First, the Center for Democracy operated in tandem with Krieble Institute in the Soviet Union.

They both ran training in an effort to spread right-wing propaganda, they both eventually abandoned an alliance with Gorbachev to befriend Boris Yeltsin, and the leaders of both supported Lozansky in his effort to create his fake University and his thinly veiled intelligence operation in Washington DC.

Secondly, Paul Manafort and Henry Kissinger served on the board of the CFD.

Paul Manafort, Jack Abramoff, Bob Dole, Dana Rohrabacher, and Paul Weyrich seem to be the prime movers behind the American Conservative movement’s allying with the fascist political movements of Russia, but Dr. Ed Lozansky has done more to unite these two groups than virtually anyone else.

Dr. Lozansky joined the Committee for a Free Afghanistan in 1984.

The CFA was a project between the Abramoff supported American Security Council, Accuracy in Media, and Paul Weyrich’s Free Congress Foundation.

Everyone mentioned below is also part of the Council for National Policy.

Other reports place House Representative Dana Rohrabacher in Afghanistan during that time period.

John McCain’s 2008 Presidential Campaign Was Run By Paul Manafort’s Business Partner Rick Davis

Senator McCain is a staunch opponent of Russia and its authoritarian President Vladimir Putin.

However, McCain still hired Paul Manafort’s partner as his campaign manager anyway.

It led The Nation to question what a McCain presidency would’ve looked like thusly:

Republican candidate John McCain meets with his wife and Campaign Manager Rick Davis in 2008.The story of how McCain’s closest aides and employees have been undermining his vociferously expressed opposition to Putin and Russia’s oligarchs offers a highly disturbing preview of what a McCain administration might look like.When McCain’s campaign proclaims “country first,” one has to wonder, Which country? The one with the highest bidder?Sen. McCain stood idly by, and watched up close and personally, as his campaign manager’s friends assisted Putin in taking over de facto control of Montenegro, while Davis introduced the Republican to Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska. He called the events in Montenegro:

“The greatest European democracy project since the end of the Cold War.”Later, Oleg Deripaska became best known as the Russian oligarch named in an AP report as funding Trump Campaign manager Paul Manafort in a multi-year PR campaign to burnish Putin’s image.

That’s why Deripaska invited the Arizona Republican to celebrate his 70th birthday on his yacht in the Adriatic Sea, which he attended.

Ex-Senator Bob Dole was also on Deripaska’s payroll in his quest to gain a US entry visa, and he was also on the payroll of Montenegro.

John McCain also had anti-Putin lobbyists on his payroll — one of whom received considerable payments as an agent of the Georgian Republic — that ultimately resulted in a phone call from the GOP’s presidential candidate to that nation’s president, only a few months before Putin invaded and created the breakaway Republic of South Ossetia, which is not internationally recognized.

Ultimately, McCain decided against going full Putin during his 2008 GOP Presidential campaign, and he refused to hire Paul Manafort to run his Republican National Convention efforts — even though he was partners with Davis his campaign manager — purportedly over his Ukrainian ties.

Ultimately, Donald Trump would choose to hire Paul Manafort for the very same position in 2016, to fight a bitter intra-party battle for the sole of the Republican party at their convention in Cleveland.

It would prove to be a fateful decision.

Conclusion

Dr. Edward Lozansky has devoted his life to this goal, making some very important friendships and alliances over the years.

We have tied him to every major player, every major initiative, and every major conservative think tank, the Republican Senate caucus, Presidents and Republican candidates and more since he arrived in the United States.

His relationship with America began with a whirlwind ride to the top of national news and international politics.

That’s where he has stayed for decades, but has he been deceiving his Republican friends and acting a paid the agent of the Russian state?

Lozansky told us no on Twitter in the one question he has answered thus far:

“Your AIUM (American University In Moscow) is supposedly located on Moscow State’s campus. Where? Is that paid for by the Russian state?”

Here’s a screenshot of AIUM’s web page on his Russia House website today.

Lyndon LaRouche, Cult Figure Who Ran for President 8 Times, Dies at 96

Feb. 13, 2019

Lyndon LaRouche at a news conference in Concord, N.H., in 1987. A frequent presidential candidate, he began his career on the far left and ended it on the far right.Bettmann/Getty ImagesLyndon LaRouche, the quixotic, apocalyptic leader of a cultlike political organization who ran for president eight times, once from a prison cell, died on Tuesday. He was 96.

His death was announced on the website of his organization, La Rouche/Pac. The statement did not specify a cause or say where he died.

Defining what Mr. LaRouche stood for was no easy task. He began his political career on the far left and ended it on the far right. He said he admired Benjamin Franklin, Alexander Hamilton, Abraham Lincoln and Ronald Reagan and loathed Hitler, the composer Richard Wagner and other anti-Semites, though he himself made anti-Semitic statements.

He was fascinated with physics and mathematics, particularly geometry, but called concerns about climate change “a scientific fraud.”

He condemned modern music as a tool of invidious conspiracies — he saw rock as a particularly British one — and found universal organizing principles in the music of Bach, Beethoven and Mozart.

Some called him a case study in paranoia and bigotry, his mild demeanor notwithstanding. One biographer, Dennis King, in “Lyndon LaRouche and the New American Fascism” (1989), maintained that Mr. LaRouche and his followers were a danger to democratic institutions.

Mr. LaRouche denigrated a panoply of ethnic groups and organized religions. He railed against the “Eastern Establishment” and environmentalists, who he said were trying to wipe out the human race. Queen Elizabeth II of England was plotting to have him killed, he said. Jews had surreptitiously founded the Ku Klux Klan, he said. He described Native Americans as “lower beasts.”

Even so, Mr. LaRouche was able to develop alliances with farmers, the Nation of Islam, teamsters, abortion opponents and Klan adherents. Acolytes kept Mr. LaRouche’s political machine going by peddling his tracts and magazines in airports, and by persuading relatives and friends to donate large sums to help him fight his designated enemies.

He operated through a dizzying array of front groups, among them the National Democratic Policy Committee, through which he received millions of dollars in federal matching money in his recurring presidential campaigns. His forces also sponsored candidates at the state and local levels, including for school board seats.

His movement attracted national attention, especially in 1986, when two LaRouche followers, Mark Fairchild and Janice Hart, unexpectedly won the Democratic nomination for lieutenant governor and secretary of state, respectively, in Illinois.

Adlai E. Stevenson III, the Democratic candidate for governor of Illinois that year, was appalled. He denounced the LaRouche group as “neo-Nazis” and refused to run with Mr. Fairchild and Ms. Hart, organizing a third-party bid instead. He, as well as the LaRouche supporters, lost to James R. Thompson, the Republican incumbent.

Some voters said they had voted for Mr. Fairchild and Ms. Hart because they had been endorsed by Mr. LaRouche’s National Democratic Policy Committee, which they thought was affiliated with the mainstream Democratic Party.

Critics of Mr. LaRouche said he had used that committee to deceive people abroad as well. In 1982, he managed to arrange a meeting with President José López Portillo of Mexico, evidently because Mexican officials thought Mr. LaRouche represented the Democratic Party.

“I’m as American as apple pie,” Mr. LaRouche once said.

Whatever he was, he received thousands of votes in his campaigns for president. In 1980, he outpolled Gov. Jerry Brown of California by a thousand votes in the Democratic presidential primary in Connecticut. In 1986, the candidates fielded by his National Democratic Policy Committee received 20 to 40 percent of the vote in local elections in California, Idaho, Illinois, Indiana, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Texas.

Lyndon Hermyle LaRouche Jr. was born on Sept. 8, 1922, in Rochester, N.H., to Lyndon and Jesse (Weir) LaRouche. He grew up in the Quaker tradition. His father was a traveling salesman for the United States Shoe Machinery Corporation, and his mother once ran a Quaker meeting in Boston’s Back Bay.

His was not a happy childhood. Boys would pick on him, he said, but he refused to fight them, which only brought more disapprobation.

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It got no better after the family moved to Lynn, Mass. He regarded himself there as an outcast and had few friends in high school. He was not an “ugly duckling,” he said, “but a nasty duckling.”

When World War II began, Mr. LaRouche declared himself a conscientious objector, citing his pacifist Quaker upbringing. But toward the end of the war he enlisted in the Army, despite his mother’s objections.

Matt Guice, center, a field organizer for Mr. LaRouche’s political action commitee, distributed fliers in Manhattan in 2013.Mark Lennihan/Associated Press

Matt Guice, center, a field organizer for Mr. LaRouche’s political action commitee, distributed fliers in Manhattan in 2013.Mark Lennihan/Associated PressAfter the war, he enrolled in Northeastern University in Boston but “resigned,” he said, because the university was not challenging his superior intellect. He said he had been able to become the century’s leading economist without formal college study.

He married Janice Neuberger in the early 1950s and had a son, Daniel, by her in 1956. The marriage failed, and he never talked publicly about his son and his former wife in his later years.

Mr. LaRouche’s political roots were Marxist. From 1948 to 1963, he was active in the Socialist Workers Party, a Trotskyite group.

His own group surfaced during the student unrest at Columbia University in the late 1960s as a faction of the left-wing Students for a Democratic Society. It evolved into the National Caucus of Labor Committees, an organization largely made up of young upper-middle-class people who espoused Mr. LaRouche’s Marxist views.

He first ran for president in 1976 as the candidate of the left-wing United States Labor Party, now defunct.

By then, though, his politics had already begun moving to the right. And after spending much time in West Germany, he returned with right-wing, anti-Semitic views. Many of his followers made the shift with him.

George Johnson, the author of “Architects of Fear: Conspiracy Theories and Paranoia in American Politics” (1983), wrote that Mr. LaRouche had developed a conspiracy theory that stretched back to the beginnings of civilization.

“In the world according to LaRouche,” Mr. Johnson wrote, “history is a war between the Platonists (the good guys) and the evil Aristotelians. Anyone who has taken Philosophy 101 can follow the drift: Platonists believe in standards, an absolute truth that can be divined by philosopher kings like Mr. LaRouche. To the Aristotelians everything is relative.”

In Mr. LaRouche’s view, Mr. Johnson continued, “true Platonists believe that industrialization, technology and classical music should be used to bring wealth and enlightenment to the citizens of the world.”

He added: “The Aristotelians are trying to stop them by using not only sex, drugs and rock ’n’ roll but also environmentalism and quantum theory. With their bag of brainwashing techniques, they hope to trick civilization into destroying itself, bringing on a new dark ages in which the world’s riches will be firmly in the hands of the oligarchs.”

Mr. LaRouche’s views became the foundation of a political movement. By the mid-1970s, his organization had 37 offices in North America and 26 in Europe and Latin America. A core membership in the United States numbered about 1,000. One follower won 27 percent of the vote in a local election in Seattle. Mr. LaRouche was pulling in enough money nationally to qualify for federal matching funds for his presidential campaigns.

He had also become an entrepreneur, starting three companies, one of which printed newspapers for high schools; together they brought in revenues of $5 million or more a year.

In his efforts to build a worldwide organization, Mr. LaRouche was helped by his wife, Helga Zepp-LaRouche, a native of Germany who had been a journalist there. Information about his survivors was not immediately available.

Mr. LaRouche was at the apex of his power in the mid-1980s, when he moved his headquarters to a large rented estate in Northern Virginia, in Round Hill, outside Leesburg. When neighbors wondered aloud why he had turned the estate into an armed camp, rigged with electronic security and patrolled by men with semiautomatic rifles, Mr. LaRouche went on the attack. He said that the Leesburg Garden Club was “a nest of Soviet fellow travelers.”

In 1987, after an F.B.I. investigation, Mr. LaRouche was convicted in Virginia on charges of scheming to defraud the Internal Revenue Service and of deliberately defaulting on more than $30 million in loans from thousands of his supporters. He was sentenced to 15 years in prison and sent to a federal penitentiary in Minnesota.

The conviction hurt his movement but did not end it. He was released from prison in 1994, after serving a third of his sentence. He immediately announced that he would run for president in 1996. He ran again in 2000 and 2004. After Barack Obama was elected in 2008, Mr. LaRouche warned that the new president was in “grave and imminent danger” of being assassinated by the “British Empire,” a familiar target of Mr. LaRouche’s.

By 2015 he had long turned against Mr. Obama, calling for his impeachment and accusing him in one instance of orchestrating Turkey’s downing of a Russian fighter jet involved in the war in Syria. “Obama organized an act of war, and has thus endangered the United States, as well as all of humanity,” Mr. LaRouche wrote.

But he could be bipartisan in his attacks. He accused the Bush family of collaborating with Nazi Germany during World War II, and said that the invasion of Iraq in 2003 was a product of a neoconservative conspiracy, led by Vice President Dick Cheney, to deceive the American people. That view was expressed in a series of pamphlets, titled “Children of Satan.”

But Mr. LaRouche was heartened by the election of President Trump, though he perceived a British conspiratorial hand reaching into the United States to foment efforts to “politically paralyze” the president and bring about his impeachment.

That would be a mistake, he said. As his website declared, “Not since William McKinley has a president been so clear in his intent to return the nation to the economic tradition of Alexander Hamilton, to end the policies of British imperial free trade, and make a full commitment to industry, manufacturing, scientific advancement and world peace.”https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/13/obit ... -dead.html

Mueller's office says in a new court filing that investigators executed search warrants on accounts used to "facilitate the transfer of stolen documents for release" and several included communications with Roger Stone.

‏Mueller's office says the charges against Roger Stone "are part of the same alleged criminal event or transaction" as the ones it filed against Russian intelligence officers for hacking Democratic political organizations.

Special counsel prosecutors say they have communications of Stone with WikiLeaks

Washington (CNN)Prosecutors said for the first time that they have evidence of Roger Stone communicating with WikiLeaks, according to a new court filing from special counsel prosecutors.

During its investigation of the Russian hack of the Democrats, "the government obtained and executed dozens of search warrants on various accounts used to facilitate the transfer of stolen documents for release, as well as to discuss the timing and promotion of their release," the prosecutors wrote Friday to a federal judge.

"Several of those search warrants were executed on accounts that contained Stone's communications with Guccifer 2.0 and with Organization 1," which is WikiLeaks.

Previously, the prosecutors had only outlined how Stone attempted to get in touch with WikiLeaks' Julian Assange through intermediaries. Stone sought to learn about what the hackers had stolen from the Democratic Party and how he hoped for its release so it could help Donald Trump's campaign, prosecutors have said.

The new filing provided no further details on what was contained in the communications.

There is one known exchange of messages between WikiLeaks and Stone. In February 2018, the Atlantic reported the Stone exchanged direct messages via Twitter with the WikiLeaks account in which Stone was asked to stop associating himself with the site. Both denied they were in contact about the release of Clinton emails.The prosecutors have not yet explained in full the extent to which Stone actually reached WikiLeaks or Assange, or levied public charges against them for their role in the distribution of the hacked data.

Friday's filing is the strongest detail yet provided by the prosecutors that Stone and WikiLeaks were in touch.

Prosecutors stated that in obtaining the accounts, they found communications between Stone and WikiLeaks, which is only described as Organization 1, as well as Guccifer 2.0 which is the alias used by Russian intelligence to disseminate the documents.

Stone and his legal team will have access to these search warrants as they review evidence in the case to prepare for his trial. He has pleaded not guilty to charges of witness tampering, obstruction of justice and lying.

Case will not be reassigned

Judge Amy Berman Jackson on Friday denied Stone's attempt to get a new judge in his case, by alleging that his charges are unrelated to a case about the Russian hack of the Democrats. Prosecutors say they are indeed related, partly because they both hinge on some of the same search warrants.

Gag order

Jackson also placed a gag order on Stone and attorneys involved in his criminal case, though Stone's ability to speak publicly isn't completely restricted.

Lawyers "for the parties and the witnesses must refrain from making statements to the media or in public settings that pose a substantial likelihood of material prejudice to this case," Jackson wrote.

They, their clients and even Stone are also not allowed to speak in and around the courthouse.

southpaw‏This is the filing I've been waiting for today. The SCO says evidence in Roger Stone's case was found in accounts that were searched for the GRU case, in which 11 Russian military officers were charged with a conspiracy to interfere in the election.

In other words, following the evidence from the Russian side of the investigation led the Special Counsel's Office to Roger Stone. Consider the implications of that.

For another, it includes the first SCO confirmation of @NatashaBertrand's report that Stone communicated directly with Assange. It also firmly ties Stone to paragraph 44 of the Netyshko indictment, which quoted his DMs with Guccifer 2.0 but didn't name him.

In response to Roger Stone’s bid to get a new judge, the government has submitted a filing explaining why his case is related to the GRU indictment. It explains that Stone’s alleged false statements pertained to an investigation into links between the Russians who stole Democratic emails, entities who dumped them, and US persons like Stone:

The defendant’s false statements did not arise in a vacuum: they were made in the course of an investigation into possible links between Russian individuals (including the Netyksho defendants), individuals associated with the dumping of materials (including Organization 1), and U.S. persons (including the defendant).

More interestingly, it makes clear that Stone’s communications “with Guccifer 2.0 and with Organization 1” were found in some of the accounts used to transfer and promote the stolen emails.

In the course of investigating that activity, the government obtained and executed dozens of search warrants on various accounts used to facilitate the transfer of stolen documents for release, as well as to discuss the timing and promotion of their release. Several of those search warrants were executed on accounts that contained Stone’s communications with Guccifer 2.0 and with Organization 1.

To be clear: We know that Stone had (innocuous) DMs with both Guccifer 2.0 and WikiLeaks. So this passage is not necessarily saying anything new. But given that Stone’s indictment obscures precisely who his and Jerome Corsi’s go-between with WikiLeaks is, it suggests there may be more direct Stone communications of interest.

Stone will get a sealed description of what those warrants are and — eventually — get the warrants themselves in discovery.

The relevant search warrants, which are being produced to the defendant in discovery in this case, are discussed further in a sealed addendum to this filing.

Meanwhile, Amy Berman Jackson has issued a very limited gag in Stone’s case, prohibiting lawyers from material comments on the case, but gagging Stone only at the courthouse. That said, her gag includes lawyers for witnesses, which would seem to include Jerome Corsi lawyer Larry Klayman.

Counsel for the parties and the witnesses must refrain from making statements to the media or in public settings that pose a substantial likelihood of material prejudice to this case

ABJ does give Stone the following warnings to shut up, however.

This order should not be interpreted as modifying or superseding the condition of the defendant’s release that absolutely prohibits him from communicating with any witness in the case, either directly or indirectly. Nor does this order permit the defendant to intimidate or threaten any witness, or to engage or attempt to engage in any conduct in violation of 18 U.S.C. §1512.

Finally, while it is not up to the Court to advise the defendant as to whether a succession of public statements would be in his best interest at this time, it notes that one factor that will be considered in the evaluation of any future request for relief based on pretrial publicity will be the extent to which the publicity was engendered by the defendant himself.